Tag: university

Academic Entanglement for an Englishman Abroad

My recent talk with a student counsellor from an American university was a pretty bracing engagement.  It was all about objectives, needs and ability to pay with a swift follow up email on what I needed to do next.  What I had anticipated as a low-key chat about study options became as clinical and unnerving as an exploratory colonoscopy.

One outcome was a suggestion that I really needed to get my academic qualifications verified in the US.  My initial indignation was around the fact that I have the certificates and academic transcripts for all the higher degrees.  They have been accepted as evidence for two senior roles at UK universities so it was a surprise to find that they would not cut the mustard if I chose to apply to a US university.

The certificates are with a small batch of papers which I keep in a hard-backed envelope and will leave the house with me in the event of a fire.  Leafing through the envelope I was surprised but relieved to see that I still have the certificate from Pontins Holiday Camp confirming that I swam a width when I was eleven years old.  I even have the scraps of paper which confirm my sub-optimal performance at ‘O’ and ‘A’ level

It’s fair to say that I was not the most dedicated scholar during my school years and ‘O’ really did mean ‘Ordinary’ while ‘A’ was probably shorthand for ‘Average at best’.  I also have four CSEs which my peers would reflect stands for Completely Second-rate Education.  I am still slightly stung by the comment on one school record that says ‘always did the minimum with least effort’ but realise, looking back, that it was probably true.

Of course, we are all familiar with stories about the rather underwhelming academic record of Einstein and Churchill.  But the former’s minor troubles in French and the Humanities were more than overshadowed by the fact that he mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.  Even the latter’s patchy school record can be forgiven for his 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature demonstrating “his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”

I can’t claim either as inspiration but by my late twenties, having been thoroughly schooled in the meaning of discipline and application by the retailers at Tesco and ASDA, I hauled myself out of my academic tailspin.  Eleven years of studying at a distance and paying out of my own pocket schooled me in submitting essays at 3am in the morning and posting them from motorway service stations, airports and even foreign capitals.  Six years of summer schools educated me in how surprisingly feral middle-aged people can become when let off the leash with people they will never see again.

After all that effort it was very satisfying to get my degrees which made it all the more perplexing to realise that the certificates and my honest demeanour were not going to be enough. I guess that every computer now has the software to knock up a reasonable copy that might allow someone to substantiate claims of having a really high IQ and a big brain. Or they might simply choose to make the claim while ensuring that their academic records never saw the light of day.

My diligent counsellor advised me that the best thing to do was have my qualifications reviewed by World Education Services (WES) or a similar service.  For $150 dollars they would confirm to an American university or an employer something that the University awarding my degree already knew.  I’m keeping the bits of paper in the hard-backed envelope but have a sense of sadness that their purpose is almost entirely lost.

I chose to go with WES because it sounds like a real person which, I suspect, is one of the reasons that Alexa seems to have become more popular and talked about than Siri.   SIRI is derived from Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface but is also a real name in Scandinavia with the meaning ‘beautiful victory’.  Given that not many speak Scandinavian (and even fewer speak Swahili where ‘siri’ means secret) I’d guess that this is lost on most of the world.

While Alexa is a made-up name it has sufficient echoes of standard first names, male and female, to sound familiar.  Alexander the Great, Sir Alex Ferguson (who is considered the greatest after winning the Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup in a single season) and Alex Kingston are among the better known.  It is pleasing to note in terms of new words I have learnt today that Alexandra Smirnoff (1838–1913) was a Finnish pomologist – the branch of botany that studies and cultivates fruit.

Returning to the task in hand I can report that the entanglement with WES and my alma mater, the Open University, has been less than perfect so far.  WES has quite exacting demands in terms of material being sent under seal and signature and the Open University form making the request does not allow me to specify this in detail.  I am left hoping, without expectation, that these organisations are so familiar with the process that it will all work out.

The system seems to have largely been established for those pursuing careers or qualifications in academia.  It’s an opaque world which institutions would do well to open up by making transcripts available through secure digital systems for free.  These should be available to any institution or employer, anywhere in the world, authorised by the student to access them.

Brexit – University Challenge But Pathway Provider Opportunity?

Last Friday saw a pretty eye-catching announcement by the University of Surrey whose problems appear to demand radical cost-cutting action including offering all staff voluntary redundancy. One highlight was Vice-Chancellor Max Lu’s comment that ‘Some of the main financial challenges include reduced income due to Brexit….’.  If that’s right a number of universities might be even more troubled. 

In 2017/18 the average percentage of EU students (defined as EU domiciled but non-UK) in all degree awarding institutions listed by HESA was 5.94%.  With an EU population of 9.9% Surrey was considerably above the norm but far from alone with Lancaster University and City University at 10.1% and 10.5% respectively. This might go some way to explaining Lancaster’s desire to set up a remote campus in Germany.

Leaving aside relatively narrow, specialist degree awarding institutions, Cranfield with 21.2% EU and University Colleges Birmingham with 20.6%, look to have a lot at stake.  The broadly-based university with greatest exposure seems to be Aberdeen where 19.9% are EU.  If the big brands and specialists are able to overcome any Brexit jitters the next most vulnerable English university looks to be Essex with 12.8% EU.

Table 1: Top 20 Universities for EU Students As A Percentage Of Total Enrollments (excluding  specialist institutions) 2017-18

Of course, the spectre of Brexit may just be the University of Surrey’s way of getting impetus for restructuring.  To be absolutely fair Lu’s comments continue, “… and an ever more competitive student recruitment environment, significantly increasing pension costs and a national review of tuition fee levels.”. That would be true for every university so it is interesting that he adds, “Our university also faces the not inconsiderable impact of a fall in our national league table positions.”

The potential for league tables to create such havoc with a University’s finances is troubling and needs consideration at another time. But the potential for a sharp fall in European Union recruits is certain to be a concern for those institutions with heavy representation and it would bring even sharper competition to the battle for UK and full-fee paying international students.  In that respect the bigger brands have an inbuilt advantage and will be looking to take an even bigger share of the market.

As Brexit plays out it will also be interesting to see if more pathway operators are able to convert university nervousness about recruitment into opportunities for partnership. Navitas seem to have a head start in operating overseas campuses for partners, but QA Higher Education operates UK campuses with full-degree courses for several of its partners, and INTO have been doing the same for Newcastle University in London. It’s an interesting development area for pathway operators attempting to diversify and deepen their services.

UNIVERSITY PATHWAYS – INTO THE VALLEY

The potential sale of INTO University Partnerships has created a lot of interest with a particular focus on the Joint Venture (JV) model it pioneered and how they are performing.    A sharp-eyed and smart ex-colleague pointed me to Companies House, the United Kingdom’s registrar of companies, which offers access to annual reports for every JV as well as the wholly owned entities INTO Manchester and INTO London World Education Centre.  They make for interesting reading.

No doubt the wonks, analysts and number crunchers will comb these reports over the coming months as part of their due diligence and financial interrogation. As The Skids minor-hit of 1979, Into The Valley said – its ‘time for the audit, the gathering trial.’ But for this blog I am going to focus on enrolments because that is the area where most pathway providers claim they bring expertise, investment, global reach and commercial nous which add up to student recruitment that universities cannot match.

The individual filings appear to be consistent in reporting the average number of students in each Centre during the year. Table one shows these for ten entities operating in the 2013/14 Financial Year and still operating in 2016/17. This excludes the now closed St George’s University JV and the INTO Newcastle University London JV established in 2015.

Table 1: Yearly Average Enrolments at INTO Centres

*Manchester and London are not joint ventures.  Their parent company is INTO University Partnerships
Source: Annual Reports 2013/14 to 2016/17

The average enrolments in 2013/14 across all Centres was 4284 while in 2016/17 it was 4016 – a decline of -6.3%. The peak year for enrolment was 2014/15 when an average of 4293 enrolments are shown. As a comparator HESA reports that the UK HE sector’s first year international enrolments declined from 179,250 in 2013/14 to 172,275 in 2016/17 – a fall of 3.9%.

There will be many drivers for enrolment performance and as my previous blogs have indicated there have been winners and losers amongst universities over the past few years. Many in-house international offices have secured outstanding results and some universities have received strong support from the performance of their pathway partners. The picture for INTO looks mixed with only the Queen’s and Stirling JVs showing an increase in average numbers enrolled.

What also interested me was that I once heard a pathway leader explaining to a worried Vice-Chancellor that the period from start up to profitability for a pathway was ‘deepening and widening’. Both Gloucestershire and Stirling JVs were in start-up mode in this period having been incorporated in 2013. But their fortunes seem to have taken different directions with the latter forging ahead as the former has fallen back. It would be no surprise if pathways at more lowly-ranked universities were finding it harder to make progress under increasingly competitive conditions.

We can also see that even some of the pathways at well-known top 30 universities, Newcastle and East Anglia, have had a pretty torrid time in terms of enrolments. Newcastle enrolments fell by 24.3% from their peak in 2014/15 and East Anglia by 17.5% in the same period. City, a relatively well-known university with strong international intakes and a London advantage, saw numbers fall by 25.5%.  This suggests that even well-established partnerships with big name partners are not a guarantee of successful enrolment.

The university partners are, of course, still securing students who progress from these pathways but this scale of decline is unlikely to be made up for by improved progression rates or increased fee levels. My recent blogs have demonstrated that both Newcastle and UEA have seen their overall international student fee income declining over recent years. And while INTO University Partnerships’ share of the JV profits is not the only stream of income to its business it is reasonable to assume that the company would prefer operating profits to losses.

For INTO, and the pathway sector more generally, in both the UK and the US the challenges are not going away any time soon. These include the growth of favoured locations such as Canada, Australia and Europe, the emergence of new destinations and particularly those in Asia, and the ever-present spectre of improving on-line delivery and in-country tuition improving English-language levels.

Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, provides an apt metaphor. He wrote that as the cavalry charged ‘into the valley of Death’ there were ‘cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them’. There were survivors but of the original 600 Light Dragoons, Lancers and Hussars in the charge fewer than 200 were able to re-assemble with their horses.

Over a billion dollars has been invested in private pathway providers since 2010 as the prospects for growth in the US and UK seemed bright. If there is a next round of deals for those providers – Study Group have also been for sale recently –  it seems likely that the price must reflect the market challenges. If not we may recall that, as French Marshal Pierre Bosquet reportedly said of the Charge, “C’est de la folie” — “It is madness.”